Spencer P Jones: High Anxiety

Spencer P Jones plays the Miami Tavern on Thursday, the Waterloo Hotel on Friday and the Port Royal Mill at Kallangur on Saturday

Spencer P Jones is a legend of Australian rock, his reputation sealed with the likes of Beasts Of Bourbon, The Johnnys et al, and enhanced with the excellent albums The Last Gasp (2000) and last year’s The Lost Anxiety Tapes, featuring his band Cow Penalty.

He also provided his production skills to Sixfthick’s Chicken long player, an experience he describes as, “beautiful. It was an absolute pleasure to work with those guys.”

This week, Spencer makes his return to Queensland, including shows at the Miami Tavern, the Waterloo Hotel and the Port Royal Mill, Kallangur. These will be pretty much unmissable events, if Spencer and Cow Penalty’s 2000 show at The Zoo, an evening of dark, compelling, soulful and rootsy rock and roll, is anything to go by.

“This is a little known fact about Cow Penalty,” says Spencer over the phone. “We played up (at Kallangur) once before. There was a room full of people who had never seen or heard of us and they went off, the really liked us. So we’re going back to play to those people again.”

Spencer’s played to people in many different locales, including a jaunt last year in New York City with a makeshift band that included Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes and Television drummer Billy Ficca.

“That was a happy accident,” Spencer recalls. “Because Rat Scabies (The Damned) was originally going to drum. But he couldn’t get out of London due to a few reasons. I was already over there I’d known Brian Ritchie for years. So I said, ‘Do you know anyone?’ and he said, ‘Yeah I know this guy Dennis from the Smithereens’ and we couldn’t find him, so Brian said ‘I know who’d be really good – Billy Ficca from Television’. I’m like, ‘OK, that sounds good!’ It took a long time to find him, but we tracked him down the day before the first gig and had a rehearsal on the actual day of the first gig and he was fantastic! We did four shows and they went down pretty good. We played the Motor City Bar, the Mercury Lounge, the Continental and we played Maxwells in Hoboken, New Jersey.”

Do you get recognition in the States?

“Well, I hadn’t really played under my name outside of those shows.”

Surely there would have been some people who would know your work with Beasts of Bourbon?

“Oh sure,” says Spencer. “Guys would show up with records to get signed. But there’s enough people over there for that to occur, you know? Someone would have heard of you somewhere, heh heh.”

At the upcoming shows, we can expect plenty from the Lost Anxiety Tapes and some new material as well.

“We’ll be playing some new stuff that we’ve recorded but not released yet,” he explains. “We hope to be back into a studio in May to do a new album.”

The result is hopefully a 2002 album release. Do you like to be an album-a-year kinda guy?

“I dunno. I’d like to be an album a month kinda guy, but it doesn’t work that way!”

When does the songwriting bug strike – on the road, or do you have to set time aside to write?

“No, I don’t have to set any time aside,” Spencer says. “A song can happen anywhere and anytime.”

Does jamming at rehearsals create new songs?

“Not really. Sometimes we’ll get a cool riff, but I’d hardly describe it as a song. That riff can sometimes become the basis of a song. I think maybe a lot of bands get songs that way, but I don’t particularly do that. It’s not really my way of operating.”

Spencer’s album The Last Gasp got a tremendous reception, topping many folks’ Best Of 2000 lists. The Lost Anxiety Tapes, with its sparser instrumentation, has also hit the right notes with Spencer’s audience.

“It’s kind of hard to keep an 11-piece band going,” says Spencer, in reference to The Last Gasp’s comparatively ornate instrumentation. “So having said that, I just thought that if people don’t like what I’m doing now, they didn’t really know what I was on about in the first place.”

All he’ll let on about the new album, is that the straight-ahead band feel looks set to continue.

“It’s the difference between 11 people and three or four people,” he says. “I’m just taking it song by song.”

Spencer wants us to wait and see rather than giving a detailed pre-release analysis. As a taster, get your butt down for some seriously fine rock ‘n roll.